Saturday, 19 September 2015

Lyse Doucet sees the light (at the end of the tunnel)

The more sophisticated broadcasting technology gets, the more inefficient. Delays on lines routinely disrupt the flow of human interaction on air just as leaves on lines scupper the flow of commuting. Sudden disconnections at the crucial moment, spooky echoes and fuzziness seem far more common than they used to be.

So when Lyse Doucet was explaining on the Today Programme this morning that the migrants she was mingling with were not in fact primarily from Syria, but from Eritrea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia....(Palestine?) and all four corners of the globe, “looking for a better life” - her mangled words came from a wind tunnel in the bowels of a cave.

We couldn’t hear it very clearly, but despite the distorted quality of the sound, we got the gist.

Sarah Montague wondered if this was a threat to the European Union. Mark Urban’s message seems to be getting through.